Tuesday, December 20, 2016

A Coordinated Strategy by a Demagogue: Donald Trump is the Prince of Lies

It is time for the annual fundraiser that occurs during the month of December at which point I put on my gentle NPR fundraising voice and push out the old begging bowl which can be found by clicking on the Paypal link on the right side of the screen at ChaunceyDevega.com.

As longtime readers of this site and listeners to my podcast know, I do not accept advertising or paid sponsorships. We are at the end of the first week of fundraiser and are approximately 40 percent to the goal. If you can include the podcast and my other work in your holiday and other generosity the positive energy will be greatly appreciated.

I would like to thank all of the folks who have contributed. You kindness is, as always, moving and a reminder that we are in this struggle together. Again, I promise to "connect the dots" and tell the truth about Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and how their overt fascist turn is a threat to American democracy. I will not normalize Donald Trump. He is a political thug.

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Donald Trump is the textbook example of a demagogue. He is a bully who pretends to relate to the “common man.” He is bigoted, crude, grandiose, charismatic, egomaniacal and obsessed with personal loyalty and betrayal.

Because he is a demagogue, Donald Trump is expert at telling both the “big lie” and the “small lie.” The former is a gross and obvious effort to bend reality to his will. The latter is more difficult to counter, because by virtue of sheer volume Trump’s mountain of small lies overwhelm and exhaust those of us who believe in empirical reality.

You people were vicious, violent, screaming, “Where’s the wall? We want the wall!” Screaming, “Prison! Lock her up!” I mean, you are going crazy. I mean, you were nasty and mean and vicious and you wanted to win, right? But now, you’re cool and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent, right? Because we won, right? You’re basking in the glory of victory.

During Trump’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, he repeatedly denied that his supporters were violent and had physically attacked protesters and other people deemed the enemy.Trump’s contradictory statements about violence are part of a much larger pattern. He also promised his supporters that he would “drain the swamp” of Washington lobbyists, financiers, bankers and other “special interests.” Instead, Trump has filled his cabinet and other senior level positions with these very same people — a group whose collective wealth is greater than 30 percent of the American people.

To the bloodthirsty howls of his supporters, Donald Trump promised to imprison Hillary Clinton and encouraged personal violence against her through “Second Amendment” remedies. Trump has now admitted that was all hyperbole and that Bill and Hillary Clinton are “good people.”

Donald Trump also promised to build a huge wall to keep undocumented immigrants from entering the United States. His subsequent statements about this have been contradictory as well, but he now says such talk was metaphorical and that there will be “doors through the wall.”

Following the cowardly surrender of the Electoral College, Donald Trump will become president of the United States on Jan. 20. His lies paid great dividends during the presidential campaign. They were a potent weapon against Hillary Clinton and were one of the decisive factors in him winning the White House.

Trump’s lies also served to train the corporate news media as well as too many members of the American public to embrace his “post-truth” reality. To that end, Trump — borrowing from his idol and apparent sponsor Vladimir Putin — has created a state of perpetual disorientation and confusion among the mainstream news media and the public.

Whether through “fake news” (which is really black or gray propaganda) or the disinformation circulated by Fox and the right-wing infotainment media, a condition is created whereby basic facts are transformed into disputes and the nature of reality becomes a matter of constant debate. If everything the president does or says is by definition “news,” then Trump’s lies are amazingly dangerous and irresponsible. They will cause further harm to America’s civic culture and also the security, safety and prosperity of the country.

Apparently, Trump’s voters do not care about his lies and how he has already betrayed his promises to them before taking office. His voters, like other Republicans, are stuck in an echo chamber where conservatism is a type of religion and lies are transformed into truths: In this bizarro-world Trump is has a mandate to lead the country, and is both immensely popular and widely respected. Polling data and other evidence have repeatedly shown that such conclusions are not true.

Much of the mainstream media has complied as well by offering up fawning profiles of Trump’s semi-mythical white working-class voters and how we need to understand them, instead of holding them responsible for imposing an authoritarian regime on the country. Trump’s voters and supporters are also depicted as ignorant or easily duped, since they voted for candidates who have promised to take away their healthcare and further slash away at the country’s already threadbare social safety net. Normalizing Donald Trump ultimately requires that the corporate news media normalize his voters as well.

But perhaps the most important and most easily overlooked aspect of Trump’s allure for his public is that they largely do not care whether he is honest, trustworthy or consistent. As Joan Williams explained in a recent essay at the Harvard Business Review, Trump’s “white working-class” voters have little to no use for experts or the educated. To a large degree, Trump’s allure was based on his promise to combat the right-wing bugaboo and obsession known as “political correctness.”

The idea that a white man should treat people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and the Other in America with basic human respect and dignity is an affront to the authoritarian social-dominance behavior that is central to the revanchist and racist identities of Trump’s voters and American conservatives more generally. Hostility to “political correctness” is shorthand for the way that racism and sexism, filtered through “economic anxiety,” created a formula for victory in 2016. Trump took white racial resentment and overt bigotry and used them alternately as either a feather to titillate his voters or a stone in their shoe that caused them pain.

Almost 50 years apart, two of America’s presidents offered wisdom that helps to make sense of Donald Trump and his Svengali-like hold over a benighted sector of the white electorate.

Lyndon Johnson reflected on his upbringing in the South and the power of the color line in America this way:

If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.

Speaking at the final press conference of 2016 — and quite possibly his last as president — Barack Obama offered a warning:

Our vulnerability to Russia or any other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan, dysfunctional our political process is. That’s the thing that makes us vulnerable. If fake news that’s being released by some foreign government is almost identical to reports that are being issued through partisan news venues then it’s not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect. Because it doesn’t seem that farfetched compared to some of the other stuff that folks are hearing from domestic propagandists. To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody’s corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons and all of our institutions are, you know, full of malevolent actors, if that’s the storyline that’s being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who’ve been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff everyday from talk radio or other venues, they’re going to believe it. So if we want to really reduce foreign influence on our elections, then we better think about how to make sure that our political process, our political dialogue is stronger than it’s been.

Both presidents sounded the alarm about a deep sickness in America’s political culture. Trump and his voters are reflections of profound discontent and a crisis of national confidence. Donald Trump, the contemporary master of lies and misdirection, will only make things worse while searching, as do all authoritarian or fascist leaders, for new enemies to blame when his schemes go awry.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, as well as online magazines and publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.